Q&A: The State of McGill Law Professors’ Ongoing Strike

Kirsten Anker

As the Association of McGill Professors of Law enters the 17th day of its strike Wednesday, the union is hoping the Canadian university’s general opposition to faculty-level unions won’t stop them from securing their first collective agreement.

The union’s vice president, McGill University associate professor Kirsten Anker, said their proposals largely reflect what is already in place at the university, but McGill has argued that faculty-level unions would leave it with a patchwork of policies applying to different units of the university.

“We mainly just want to keep the existing structure, and we refer to the existing [university] regulations in that, but we wanted to attach those regulations so that it's clear what we've agreed to and that any changes to that would have to be subject to our consent,” Anker said. “They were insisting on being able to change those regulations unilaterally and have them apply to us.”

The university contested the union’s accreditation before Quebec’s labor tribunal but ultimately lost that bid. It is now seeking a judicial review of the board’s decision. 

The strike began on the first day of McGill’s 2024-2025 academic year. It comes after the union spent eight weeks on strike earlier this year, suspending it once McGill agreed to an additional four bargaining days to take place toward the end of August.

McGill did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Here, Anker discusses the state of negotiations and what the union is hoping to secure. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How is your union's morale right now?

It's generally good, I would say. There's, of course, a range of feelings about the union in general and the strike in particular. 

Nobody likes being on strike. We all teach because we want to teach, and it's all very disruptive, but people are on board with [the] understanding that this is our last option, and we don't really have a choice. And so, generally, we've been very cohesive around the decision to strike. 

At what point did the union decide it didn't have a choice and it couldn't wait any longer to withhold its labor?

We had an indefinite strike mandate back in April. We paused over the summer because the pressure points at a university in the summertime are low, and it wouldn't have been a responsible use of strike funds. 

For a first contract [in Quebec], either party can elect to call for an arbitrator. It's usually there to protect the union side, but this time, McGill pushed to [use] an arbitrator, but it was kind of clear to us that they were not doing so to genuinely get to a collective agreement. In fact, one of the reasons [the union] went on the strike the first time was that [McGill] had been going slow [and] they had been taking very, very radical and uncompromising positions, just unrealistic positions, on our proposals. 

What it came down to with this second strike was that, just before classes were slated to go back, we said, OK, we'll accept to go to arbitration and pull off the strike on all the monetary matters, like all the things that usually unions and bosses get stuck over the money, if you will drop your challenge to our accreditation. 

Our thinking was, if they genuinely want to get this collective agreement, they'll accept our offer. We said we'll go to arbitration on monetary [matters]. We've already agreed on most of the non-monetary [matters], so we want to put that into a collective agreement so that we have it in hand, and drop your [request for a judicial review of the tribunal’s decision]. They refused that. So it became really clear this was sort of our last chance.

Is this the first contract that has been negotiated in a union capacity?

That's right. 

So we're a new union. We only got certified on Nov. 7, 2022. That launched the negotiation process. So, currently, we have no collective agreement. We are a union. We've been a union for three years, but we have no collective agreement, and that's why we wanted to at least secure some of the governance [and] non-monetary issues in a collective agreement before we'd be willing to drop a strike.

What made the faculty decide to unionize?

It's been coming for a while. I'd say there, over the last 10 or more years, has been a gradual concern with centralization in university governance. So previously, faculties had had a lot more say in things that happen at the faculty level. 

Commensurate with that, there's also a growing distance between administrators and professors. The model previously has been that universities are run by professors, so we cycle in and out of these admin positions, but we're essentially all part of the same community. 

And with this increasing centralization of power, there's also come increased disparity of salaries, and also a sense that now administrators are on a kind of one-way path out of the professoriate and into managerial positions that sort of creates a separate identity. 

That [COVID-19] pandemic moment was the generative moment for the union, where we suddenly came together and said, OK, we need to have a greater say in assessing how [decisions about] teaching and learning and also the health and safety of our faculty members get made. And it was at that point that we all signed cards and formed the union.

—Editing by Kelly Duncan and Dave Trumbore.